It’s at times like this I had much deeper roots in the Comic industry than I do right now (Hey, Josh!), as the last few weeks have seen some interesting developments that made me jealous of whoever might step in to fill this role: DC Comics’ Geoff Johns is retiring from his position as chief writing peep on the Green Lantern comics, which may mean the titles associated with GL may be about to undergo a massive change in direction.

For the record I should state that I’ve never been big on superheroes, whether Marvel or DC. Growing up in the rural parts of the southwest UK meant that I had limited access to decent comics and I was weaned on a steady supply of Eagle and 2000AD – making me a staunch fan of Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, ABC Warriors, just to name a few. As a result, superheroes were always hokey to me. Sure, I read a few comics, watched some movies, but by the time I was out of young-adulthood, say 25-28, I could only say that a tiny handful of superhero oriented comics I had read were of any real value to me. Marvel’s Elektra: Assassin and DC Comic’s Marshal Law. It would be another five or six years until I read Watchmen and a few other guilty pleasures, such as League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And of course, all these are largely critical of the superhero genre and its tropes. Yeah, me and Superheroes don’t get along much.

Neonomicon’s semi-interesting, mostly-boring cover. At least it is connected to the story.

Alan Moore has become one of the preeminent voices in comics today, and quite rightly so. From his small beginnings working for 2000ad on strange little SF flavoured anecdotes (Tharg’s Future Shocks) all the way to writing what some people would call one of the best comics ever written (Watchmen) and in the process change the very idea of what we call comics and graphic novels. This might seem grandiose praise, but I do believe that he has had a massive impact. I’ve enjoyed his work immensely.

So then, I was very interested to discover that he had written a small comic series influenced by H.P.Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, entitled “Neonomicon.” A large portion of my own professional work has been dedicated to a similar pursuit, so it was inevitable that I would (eventually) get around to reading it. I am very late to the party though, since its been out for about two years. GRrr! I was dismayed, however, that it wasn’t as good as it could have been, or even, as good as it should have been. Heh, yeah, that does sound rather demanding, doesn’t it?

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

from The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft

There appears to be a strange human tendency to relate things of disparate origins to each other. And not just in weird tales, but real life also.

With the Prometheus home video release taking place tomorrow there’s been a buzz of news across the Internet to promote it. One of them is the news, or at least the concept of, the idea that Prometheus is related to several of Ridley Scott’s other movies. Obviously, Prometheus is born of the same silk as Alien, in content if not in quality, but some say the connections to movies such as Bladerunner run much deeper than previously though.

Long ago, some wise guy noticed that the cockpit display of the police spinner in Blade Runner was actually the same as the orbital insertion graphic in Alien and promptly concluded that they must be in the same universe! At this point in time, however, believable special effects as an art was still in development and very costly, so it was a matter of course to re-use elements wherever a studio could to save time and money. Blade Runner and Alien were not the only movies to re-use FX shots. The movie Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern, contained shots of the Valley Forge spacecraft were ultimately re-used in the TV Series Battlestar Galactica… Surely, if the interfaces in Blade Runner and Alien were so similar, and must therefore be in the same universe, then so too must Silent Running be in the same universe as Battlestar Galactica, if not the same event. Its ridiculous. Pish!

Like this:

What is a PS-A?

Pan-Spectrum Analyzers are devices for interpreting the electro-magnetic spectrum and audio signals, usually for linguistics or diagnostics purposes. But they have other uses as well.
Hopefully, it will be a published novel some day, but until then, there's this blog, analyzing glips and glops of SF, Fantasy, Horror books, comics, movies and video games.

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